Father Knows Best? Not When it Comes to Screens in the Classroom

The day my five-year-old son came home from school proudly announcing he had learned to download apps on what he called “my iPad,” I felt two things: the instinct of a father sensing something was off, and the reflex of a physician recognizing a familiar problem. It wasn’t his excitement that gave me pause. It was the word “my.” After a few weeks of school, he was personally identifying with a device before he was developmentally ready to contextualize his relationship to it.

As an emergency physician, I evaluate interventions the same way every time, by weighing the evidence of benefit against the risk of harm. When the data is unclear, I fall back on medicine’s oldest principle — primum non nocere. First, do no harm. I never imagined I would be applying that framework to my son’s pre-K classroom.

The echoes of COVID remain familiar: an expert class prescribing an untested solution, dismissing the concerns of the people it serves. The pandemic increased reliance on technology in education but also exposed the priorities of America’s elites. When the public sought explanations, officials issued mandates. Conformity to dogma ruled the day, and any criticism was swiftly labeled misinformation. The cost was staggering. A generation’s trust in institutions was spent in just about two years. At the core of it all was a simple belief — that experts know best.

I am watching a similar phenomenon take place in our children’s classrooms. Every day our kids go to school, we are extending an act of trust — placing them in the school’s care, expecting that parents and teachers will work together in the children’s best interests. Increasingly, the educators’ posture has shifted to something more insular: we know best, and we’ll take it from here.

The deeper irony is that on this specific question, the evidence is not on the educators’ side.

In January, neuroscientist Jared Horvath testified before a Senate subcommittee about the impact of screen time and classroom technology on kids. And in his book, “The Digital Delusion,” he notes that the impact of classroom interventions is measured using a metric called “effect size.” The threshold for meaningful impact is +0.40. Teacher-led direct instruction averages approximately +0.56 — the gold standard. Broad educational technology interventions average around +0.29 — well below the impact threshold. For context, the negative effect of bullying is -0.28. OECD countries noted an almost two-letter-grade drop on standardized testing for students who used computers “very frequently.” The MIT-based Poverty Research Center, after examining 126 studies, found that programs expanding computer access “do not improve K-12 grades and test scores.”

Many schools claim that children need early digital exposure to succeed in the modern world. But this isn’t supported by evidence, nor does it pass the common-sense test. Digital skills can be acquired in minutes to hours, and they are not what predict deep learning or professional success.

What makes this particularly corrosive is what the apps are doing to learning itself. Early childhood is the most sensitive period for attention, executive function, and self-regulation — precisely the capacities most at risk. Research consistently shows stronger comprehension and retention on paper versus screens. Horvath notes that learning requires productive struggle. The friction of sitting with a hard problem, resisting distraction, and building toward mastery is not a flaw in education; it is the process. Apps are engineered to eliminate this friction. The result is what researchers call the “illusion of mastery.” Students feel they are learning, but the depth is not there.

COVID accelerated this without resolving it. The academic consequences were severe, and so were the mental health ones — anxiety, depression, and social withdrawal spiked across age groups and have not fully recovered. We poured energy into getting children back into classrooms, then handed them the same devices back.

Worse still, many educators don’t realize that much of the “evidence” backing these programs traces back to the for-profit education tech sector that created this ecosystem. These companies have cultivated academic voices to carry their message into schools, funding research through channels educators rarely scrutinize. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley’s founders have largely kept their own children off these devices. When Peter Thiel revealed as much at a recent summit, it elicited audible gasps. Educators who believe they are following the science are, in many cases, following a sales pitch.

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro recently signed legislation mandating cursive handwriting in classrooms, explicitly to keep kids off tablets, while 10 states across the political spectrum are considering legislation to reduce screen time or restrict device programs in some way. This is no longer a fringe position.

As a father, I feel this differently than I do as a physician. Parents are watching in real time as young children develop a compulsive relationship with devices — fidgeting for the next stimulus, the next dopamine surge from apps designed to engage. Boys are particularly susceptible to these reward structures — the variable reinforcement, the next level, the next hit. The gaming addiction literature has documented it for years. We are now introducing that architecture to boys in pre-K through a school-issued device they are taught to think of as their own.

And yet the response from most schools has been silence, or worse, reassurance. Parents notice concerning changes in their children, review the data, bring their concerns to administrators, and are met with polished explanations that best practices are being followed. Parental concern is treated as a feature of the process, proof almost that the school is doing something bold.

Educators dismiss those concerns at their own peril. The trust parents extend to schools is not unconditional, and it is fraying. At a minimum, parents should have the right to opt their children out of individual device programs, and schools should provide information to parents on the potential harms. Regular efficacy assessments should accompany all device programs. No responsible physician would deny a patient the ability to decline an unproven intervention. Schools should extend a similar respect.

The larger obligation falls on the system itself. The education establishment should not be mandating device programs without a far stronger evidence base. When physicians, researchers, and parents all raise the same alarm, the appropriate response is curiosity or caution, not defensiveness. Before mandating a new intervention, demonstrate that the benefits outweigh the harms. If you can’t, don’t. Primum non nocere.

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Dr. Benjamin Chacko is an Emergency Medicine Physician and the father of two sons.